Hi everyone,I would have liked to implement the microbe stage first because it seemed like low hanging fruit. But without a coherent concept of the stage's gameplay, and no one stepping up so far to work on such a concept, I'm not feeling comfortable in hacking away and just hoping it works and is fun.

To keep the current momentum up, I'm wondering if we should maybe focus on another stage, or even start working on multiple stages in parallel. The latter would allow us to test the basic engine code in a wide range of situations, catching problems early when they are still easy to fix. On the other hand, it would possibly take longer to achieve a state where at least part of the game is actually playable, because we'll have to spread our resources thinner.

In any case, from my point of view, a prerequisite for starting work on any stage is that someone is willing to consolidate the ideas floating around the forum into a design document (preferrably in the Wiki). This will save the programmers from too much guesswork and avoids situations like "But I though it would work like this, not like that".

So, what do you think of parallel development of multiple stages? And who would like "their" stage to be implemented as one of the first?

At this stage, that is not possible. We only have a few active programmers and artists, far from enough to actually work on more than one stage. If we had much, much more people, that would be possible, but now it is not. Just my opinion.

With careful documentation about what has been done, what is currently being worked on (and by whom) and what needs to be done in the future, this is perfectly possible. This kind of documentation should be maintained anyhow, whether we are 5 or 100 people, and the issue system over at GitHub is well suited for it.

The progress on any one stage will be slower, yes. But it might very well be that overall progress will be faster. For one, some people might be more interested in working on a particular stage. They wouldn't have to wait until it's their turn to do more than discuss in the forum. As soon as their stage is available as a bare skeleton, they can start playtesting and getting feedback on the gameplay mechanics they only talked about before.

Second, community projects like this seem to have a "if you start building it, the builders will come" dynamic. Take programming, for example. Many entry level programmers that would be interested in participating in a project such as this are far more comfortable with copying and modifying existing code to achieve their goal than with writing something from scratch. So the more different examples we have working, be it C++ or Lua, the more likely it will be that someone new will be encouraged to actually contribute. Once we get to a stage where there are many small tasks in the pipeline, I plan to tag the issues I think are easy, so that newcomers know exactly where to start.

Well it's something the leaders of the project must decide. Although i find it sad that for the first time there are programmers asking what to do and nobody is interested in giving them a clear work plan.

I think it would be better to focus on one stage at a time, since each future stage gets much harder than the previous, but the manpower to be gained from releasing the stage before that would balance it out.

Also, making a future stage without having a solid stage before it would lead to a lot of complications I would imagine, like building the house before you build the foundation, or planning the interior design of the house before the house itself has been planned.

Nonetheless, there are some basic steps I feel we could work on right now, such as getting a Tech Editor prototype up and running. I would really look forward to that, since we have been discussing it a lot lately.

_________________Look at how far we've come when people thought we'd get nowhere. Imagine how far we can go if we try to get somewhere.

I'm not good in programming, but if you don't have the organism editor how would you create the mechanic editor in wich you give clothes to your creaturre?

Who said no organism editor? Also, it's called the Tech Editor, not the Mechanic Editor.

Jimexmore wrote:

CUSTOM ARMOR AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!! yes.yes. If only i knew programming.

Jimexmore, please stop it with these kinds of posts. If you don't intend to post something meaningful or contributory, I think I can speak for several people here to say that you shouldn't post these at all. You have necroposted several times, you have multiposted several times, and your posts often make less than no sense and detract from the believability of your age being twenty. I try not to be harsh, and I don't like it when I am, but this is becoming a very common occurrence.

_________________Look at how far we've come when people thought we'd get nowhere. Imagine how far we can go if we try to get somewhere.

I'm not good in programming, but if you don't have the organism editor how would you create the mechanic editor in wich you give clothes to your creaturre?

Who said no organism editor? Also, it's called the Tech Editor, not the Mechanic Editor.

Jimexmore wrote:

CUSTOM ARMOR AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!! yes.yes. If only i knew programming.

Jimexmore, please stop it with these kinds of posts. If you don't intend to post something meaningful or contributory, I think I can speak for several people here to say that you shouldn't post these at all. You have necroposted several times, you have multiposted several times, and your posts often make less than no sense and detract from the believability of your age being twenty. I try not to be harsh, and I don't like it when I am, but this is becoming a very common occurrence.

So you you don't want me to learn programming alright.I guess this is a serious project after all. So how advance are we talking about? like make anything, uniforms , really give me the custom run down

You're free to learn programming, I never said you couldn't. What I was referring to and I hope you realize are these sorts of responses:

Quote :

scenarios: >hanging out on my planet>suddenly a mass on the horizon>"huehuehuehueHueHueHueHueHUEHUEHUEHUEHUEHUE">"GIBE DAKKA OR I KRUMP YOU">most of them are fighting each other>led by a huge leader

Quote :

Don't get it started again

for all purposes "we'll never be done and the project is going nowhere"

Quote :

Cloning yes.Clone army in first phase armor AAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!! YEEEEESSS!!! FIGHTING ROBOTS TOO SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!.Also custom armor do we have it.We need it,It's probably included in the TO right?

As well as barely coherent posts like:

Quote :

I know you've been over this but it everything really to scale? Like if you make an ant sized beast will it stay ant sized or be off? i mean say you make a creature it's the biggest creature on your planet Now is it big or will the bird the size of a rat be bigger than you.

Quote :

ok now on to Symbiosis

From another thread

say you start as a cell with decent offense. you have little energy, and have to hunt and fight to survive. but then you meet one of those tasty cells that focus on defense, and have a lot of energy stored away in their bodies. you come to an alliance. The storage cell supplies you with extra energy, while you defend it. soon, you both multiply and you could have a circle of defensive cells around the storage cells. eventually, the outer ring merges to create a primitive multicellullar organism.

Now say you find a creature it stores food in its "hump" or hive or other Say you could go around and you see its little food storer "friend" being attacked and instead of standing their and letting whatevers attacking You drive it away attack it or whatever and your little storer relaxes around you and lets you take food and such and live with it they feed you,you protect them,until you evolve maybe they evolve with you So just a crazy thing I was talking about

And lastly, this thread has nothing to do with custom armour and/or uniforms, so please don't discuss that here. Armour was recently discussed in this thread, so try to keep an eye out for these areas to answer your questions.

So I hope you get the point so that we don't have to derail this thread any further.

_________________Look at how far we've come when people thought we'd get nowhere. Imagine how far we can go if we try to get somewhere.

I think it is very important to have all completed ideas to be implemented in the wiki. This is so we have one document that concisely explains all completed designs. This is so the programmers don't have to look all over the place and the designs don't get lost in the threads. Perhaps completed topics should be moved to the archive and a new topic posted which explains the finalised idea with a link to the old topic. This would allow people to revise the topic if they have anything to add.

At the moment it is very hard to see what we have decided on and what we haven't.

As for the parallel work on multiple stages. We should continue the current model of stage by stage. But for each section, some of the things we develop will carry through multiple stages. For example alot of the engine work in the Microbe stage will carry over to Multicellular.

I actually think it woudn't be a to bad idea to make at least some small tech demos of the different stages.

If i remember correctly, the game should be developed in ogre. So something like a small tech demo with a predefined and simple creature running around in a small area would be nice.

And possible a tech demo of the stategic mode. Aswell with a simple background and possible a unit to move around.

Would give a better look on the game. Possible it could get some additional peoples intrested in it aswell.

For the wiki, yea it would be important to update it. I visited it short ago to get updated on the game again. What i have seen are some old infos about a very old prototype and its sometimes aswell a bit complicating to get the new vids. So linking them in the wiki would be imporant aswell.

Well, if you're going to release everything as soon as it works, then we probably won't even need one. I'll make lots of videos of the first complete microbe stage on Youtube, I guess, although it would be nice if we could get someone well known to do it.

The organism stage is actually what interests me, I also played with the organism / tech editor awhile back, but it was written with my GUI is I remember correctly so I will need to recompile ogre with my GUI support this time. Also windows compiles of the simple beginning programming I now have working, in Linux I am almost there, it compiled yesterday,mbut the make install failed so I need to get the older version of boost ogre asks for correctly installed in my /usr/local/lib and include first. Ok well, I will look into the organism stage soon.

The organism stage is actually what interests me, I also played with the organism / tech editor awhile back, but it was written with my GUI is I remember correctly so I will need to recompile ogre with my GUI support this time. Also windows compiles of the simple beginning programming I now have working, in Linux I am almost there, it compiled yesterday,mbut the make install failed so I need to get the older version of boost ogre asks for correctly installed in my /usr/local/lib and include first. Ok well, I will look into the organism stage soon.

If I understood correctly, you will try and make a prototype for the organism/tech editor or organism stage? That is excellent, to be honest, I'm really just interested in the organism and society/industrial stages of the game aswell, but I understand that we need to first make a microbe stage to actually show people that we have some sort of a solid game. Once you made something you think is enough, you should make a new thread in the "prototype" section of the forum so that you can show your work. I'm sure that a lot of people, including me, would be very, very excited to have some sort of prototype for the post-microbe stages of the game, especially the organism stage.